Twenty-four December photos:
REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE
I knew it was going to be a long day. In fact, I was dreading it.
About a year ago, while looking at something or other online, I saw that David Icke was going to be speaking at Wembley. Immediately, I bought a ticket. The tickets were quite expensive, between £40 – £60. I figured that if I was spending £40 on a ticket to see David Icke, I might as well spend £60 and get a better seat. That was a year ago. It seemed funny a year ago.
Since then, I’ve been to the “Inspired By David Icke” discussion group several times. I’ve met quite a few people who believe Icke’s theories. I’ve gone to the pub with them. It’s easy to dismiss these people as weirdos and cranks, but on the whole, the people I’ve met have been fairly normal. Nice. Likeable. I say “on the whole”, because there have been a couple of exceptions (a guest speaker at one session spoke about how our souls choose the experiences we have in our lifetime, and so with positive thinking, we can ensure that we only have positive experiences. The problem with this, of course, is that it raises the question of why people have negative experiences – did the souls of babies dying of starvation or those maimed in wars or victims of abuse choose those experiences? Of course they didn’t and it’s vile to suggest they did. But apart from that bloke, they’ve been nice).
To prepare for seeing Icke at Wembley, I bought a DVD of a previous talk he had given. Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More was filmed at the Brixton Academy and is a four-disc set. This is why I was dreading seeing Icke at Wembley. I knew it was going to be a long day. At the end of the second disc of The Lion Sleeps No More, after speaking for several hours, Icke looks at his watch and says “Well, we’ve come a long way, haven’t we? What we’re going to do now is have a break for, say, forty-five minutes…”
I arrived at Wembley and took my seat (seat 12, row 4, block A2) unsure of quite what to expect. There was a giant screen with a picture of David Icke. A clock counted down. Music was playing: God by John Lennon, Holding Out For A Hero by Bonnie Tyler, Don’t Look Back In Anger by Oasis, I Want To Break Free by Queen. These same songs would play during each break. Holding Out For A Hero is a brilliant song. With a few minutes left, a group of dancers came on stage and did a sort of euphoric dance.
Icke’s son, Gareth, is in a slightly awful rock band, and they did a couple of songs before each session began. I suppose he can now say that his band have played Wembley Arena, but to be honest, it seemed like nepotism to me. Bloodlines.
If you are not familiar with Icke’s ideas, his basic theory is that the universe is created from vibrational energy. The world as we perceive it is just a holographic projection of this vibrational energy. Humans are infinite awareness, we are consciousness, but there is a conspiracy to stop us from realising our true potential and instead to keep us locked in “five sense reality”. This conspiracy is led by entities Icke refers to as Archons, who are reptilian multi-dimensional beings beaming messages from the rings of Saturn (the messages are then amplified by the Moon, which is a hollow structure designed for this purpose). By manipulating our genetic code, the Archons have trapped us in this five-sense prison (this he refers to as “the hijack”, although in the Bible, it is referred to as the fall of man). There are also genetically modified human/reptilian hybrids who control the population through the media, politics and finance in order to preserve their bloodlines and keep us in a state of fear and negativity. These emotions create low frequency energy which they feed off. To combat them, we should give out positive energy and “choose love”. It’s quite a simple idea.
Whenever people mention Icke, they always say that he thinks “lizards control the world”. I’m not sure why people always pick up on the fact they’re “lizards”. He’s talking about multi-dimensional beings from space controlling humanity. Is the oddest thing about that idea really the fact that those multi-dimensional beings happen to resemble lizards? Although I thought he cheated slightly at one point. He was explaining how ancient cultures all over the world depict reptilian beings in their art and folklore – the Uraeus of ancient Egypt, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the Chinese dragon. In this list, he also included the story of the Frog Prince. That doesn’t count, surely. Frogs are amphibians. You can’t claim them as “reptilian” just because they’re green. That’s like saying a cucumber is a lizard.
To be honest, much of what he said was very similar to the stuff in The Lion Sleeps No More DVD, although he didn’t mention Saturn on the DVD. Maybe the Saturn stuff is new. On The Lion Sleeps No More DVD, he seems more interested in his idea of the “Moon Matrix”. This is his idea that the Moon is an artificial structure and is hollow. He explains how he came to this conclusion:
What happened was that I was writing this latest book and I sat down one morning, and I’ve had one or two thoughts about this before but they’ve come and gone, but I sat down one morning at the computer to start writing and it was like, and I’ve had this so many times in my life in the last twenty years, it was like an energy field descends upon me and suddenly, I just knew the Moon was not what it seems to be.
That sounds pretty convincing to me.
He didn’t explain how the Saturn theory came to him, but did talk extensively about the symbols used by secret societies and religions to represent Saturn (= Satan). This list included the following:
- eyes
- circles
- pyramids
- triangles
- reptiles
- owls
- bulls
- fire/flames
- the Phoenix
- crescents
- horns
- boats
- goats
- twin pillars/towers
- concentric circles
- rings
- the number eight
- spiders
- the number 666
- six-pointed stars
- skulls/skull and crossbones
- hexagons
- cubes
- squares
- the Crucifix
- the Kaaba
- the tefillin
- the colour black
- the colour red
- black and white squares/tiles
- mortar boards
- the Greek god Chronos
- the Grim Reaper
- time
- Old Father Time
- sickles/scythes
- crowns
- protruding tongues
- white beards
- Santa
It’s quite a long list and one which seems to include most shapes and ideas and colours and things. I was slightly disappointed that I wasn’t included in the list to be honest.
There was also a section on how these symbols are used in popular culture. Madonna and Lady Gaga both use a lot of them apparently, as do Jay-Z and Beyonce. One thing which was a bit odd was that he twice referred to imagery used by Annie Lennox during the Olympic opening ceremony and each time said “I’m not saying she’s involved in any of this” but never offered this benefit of the doubt to anyone else. I suspect Icke has a soft spot for Annie Lennox.
The third session involved Icke listing pretty much every conspiracy theory going and blaming it all on the Archontic influence: chemtrails, 9/11, 7/7, Dunblane, water fluoridation, global warming, Columbine, HAARP, Agenda 21. It’s all true, and it’s all the fault of the Archons. I’ve met a couple of 9/11 Truthers before, but I was still a bit shocked to hear thousands of people around me cheer when Icke claimed the Twin Towers were destroyed using directed-energy weapons.
Maybe it was a mistake to have paid the extra £20. I was four rows from the front, and while that meant that I could see everything perfectly (there were a couple of moments when Icke looked almost moved to tears), I didn’t really feel the scale of the event. Maybe if I’d been further back, I would have realised better just how many people were there.
The previous DVD I’d watched had quite a confrontational message: human race, get off your knees. At Wembley, Icke was more positive. Although having said that, there was quite a powerful bit at the end when Icke showed pictures of people working in the arms trade or in politics and simply shouted “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU HAVE CHILDREN. YOU HAVE GRAND-CHILDREN. YOU SHOULDN’T BE DOING THIS”. You don’t have to believe in Archons to agree that “What are you doing?” is a good question to ask people in authority. “I’m sorry but it fucking makes me sick” he said, before adding “And yes, I am available for children’s parties”. These few moments of what appeared to be genuine anger stood out against what was otherwise a genial and often funny presentation. He does perhaps rely too often on the use of an exaggerated West Midlands accent in order to reinforce a weak punchline, but then so does Lenny Henry, and I doubt he could sell out a gig at Wembley Arena.
Eventually, nearly twelve hours after he originally took to the stage, Icke reached his conclusion. We need to choose love, he said. Since his Brixton talk a couple of years ago, we have seen riots on the streets of London. “What you fight, you become” he explains. You cannot fight a violent state through violence. Instead of violent protest, Icke proposes a “non-comply-dance”. Dancing in the face of authority. Positivity instead of aggression.
And here is Icke and his team of dancers doing their non-comply-dance:
This also happened:
Apologies for the poor quality of the video, but by that stage, I’d basically been drinking all day and had just spent twelve hours listening to David Icke talking about Archons. My favourite dancer is the guy in the white shirt and brown cords who is just behind the guy with long hair in the black T-shirt. Everyone else dances in a lost, euphoric way except for him. He waves his hands in the air and jumps from foot to foot in more or less the same way as David Baddiel in the video for Three Lions. I suspect he only agreed to dance on stage because he thought he might be able to kiss a girl if he did.
And then there was some chanting:
Finally, Icke finished with his message of love:
I think that’s how I’m going to end this year’s Boring Conference (tickets available here)
Icke even extended his message of love to the reptilian Archons and the bloodline elites who manipulate and control humanity. I thought that was nice.
Of course, you can laugh at Icke, make him a figure of fun, but ultimately, his message is a positive one. We are love. The logic behind every single step he’s taken might be completely wrong, it is completely wrong, yet somehow he’s ended up in almost the right place. And at the very least, you have to admire a man who can get thousands of people to come to Wembley Arena to watch a twelve-hour PowerPoint presentation.
DOES THAT SOUND SMALL TO YOU?
There’s an advert on TV at the moment for Sky Broadband. The advert features the American actor Bruce Willis playing the American actor Bruce Willis. In the advert, Bruce Willis (played by Bruce Willis) marches into the office of his broadband supplier to complain about his service:
Bruce Willis (here playing Bruce Willis) appears to have walked into this office wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect Bruce Willis to be wearing in public. Why is Bruce Willis in his pyjamas?
Those two men shaking hands on the left there don’t even seem to have noticed the fact that Bruce Willis has just walked in wearing a dressing gown. If I worked in that office and Bruce Willis walked in wearing a dressing gown, I would definitely look round. “That’s Bruce Willis” I’d think. “Why is he in his dressing gown?”
Watching the advert, I assume the implication is that Bruce Willis’ character (played by Bruce Willis) was at home using his laptop when his broadband failed and he became so enraged that he stormed out of the door to complain face-to-face without stopping to get dressed.
There are several problems with this scenario though.
Let’s assume it’s true. Bruce Willis is at home in his pyjamas, maybe in a dressing gown. He’s using his laptop. Suddenly his broadband service is interrupted. He jumps up (grabs a dressing gown if he wasn’t already wearing one) and storms out the door to confront his lousy broadband suppliers.
But how does he know where to go? I use BT Broadband. I wouldn’t know where to go if I wanted to complain. OK, so let’s say he has a bill to hand. Maybe it came in that morning’s post, or it came the day before and was stuck to the front of his fridge with a novelty magnet he picked up on a recent holiday. He grabs the bill, looks at address, then shoves it in the pocket of his dressing gown.
OK, he now knows where he needs to go, but it’s unlikely that he’d recognise the address. He goes back, grabs his phone, then looks up the postcode. Is it likely that he lives walking distance from his broadband supplier? Not really. He goes back inside for a third time, grabs his wallet and his car keys and storms out again.
By this time, I’d be thinking that maybe it would be easier to just phone up rather than go there in person. I’d probably also think that it might be a good idea to get dressed properly.
But let’s assume that Willis’ character (Bruce) has tried phoning them in the past and it’s never worked. First you have to go through the automated call centre, entering your account number and other details, then you’re put on hold for ages, and when you finally get to speak to someone, you’re told it’s not their department and they need to put you through to someone else which means being put back on hold and then having to explain the problem all over again. Also, it must be a bit annoying when you phone a call centre like that and they ask for your name and you say “Bruce Willis” and the other person laughs and says “No, really” and then you have to say “Yes, really – my name is Bruce Willis!” and then they say “What? Really? Bruce Willis? Like the actor?” and then you have to say “Well, actually, I am the actor. Bruce Willis. That’s me” and you have to go through this every single time you want to complain about your broadband or order a pizza or whatever.
Bruce Willis (played by Willis) has had enough of all that bullshit. He’s going to go there in person and he doesn’t care how impractical that might be or how cold he might get wandering through the streets in his pyjamas and dressing gown.
So, he arrives at the offices of his broadband supplier. Now what’s his plan? What does he say to the receptionist? “I want to speak to someone, I’m unhappy with my broadband service?” She recognises him. Of course she does. He’s Bruce Willis (Willis’ performance here is quite uncanny in the way he is able to so accurately capture all of Bruce Willis’ mannerisms). She lets him through. “Just take the lift” she says. “It’s OK, it very conveniently opens out into the main office floor and there aren’t any further doors you need to go through or anything.”
By this time, of course, “Bruce Willis” would already be trending on Twitter. People are posting photos of him wandering around in his dressing gown. Everyone assumes he must be on drugs.
The lift doors open and he’s in the offices of his broadband supplier (who appear to be called “Broadband”). “Who’s in charge here?” he asks. Within seconds, he’s identified the “manager”. The manager of what? The manager of “Broadband”? Surely not. I mean, just look at him. Let’s assume he’s just the Customer Services Manager. Let’s not say that he’s in a more senior role because I think the actor playing the manager is younger than me and it would be upsetting to think someone younger than me might run a company as big as “Broadband”.
Willis shows his laptop to the manager and explains the problem.
“When I’m on the internet, this keeps happening…”
On the basis of this advert, we are to assume that Bruce Willis sits around at home, in his pyjamas, streaming his own films and watching them on his laptop. Is this how Bruce Willis wants us to think of him? A lonely man sat at home, watching past glories on a small screen? And why is he streaming these films anyway? Why doesn’t he just buy them on DVD? The Die Hard Quadrilogy is only £10.99 from Amazon (on Blu-Ray, it’s £19.99)
Even more puzzling is quite how he is able to continue streaming these videos on his laptop once he reaches the offices of “Broadband”. He left his flat, carrying his laptop under one arm, but the film he was watching carried on playing. Either the signal is extremely strong (in which case, it seems churlish for Willis to complain about the occasional outage) or Willis actually lives in the same building as the offices of “Broadband”. This would also help to explain why he is still wearing his dressing gown, but it might have been helpful to have some sort of establishing shot which would illustrate this point rather than expect us to guess that for the dramatic purposes of this advert, the actor Bruce Willis happens to live downstairs from his broadband supplier.
And if it is the case that he lives downstairs from “Broadband”, then that surely reduces the impact of his “face-to-face” confrontation – turning him from an outraged customer to a slightly ratty neighbour.
The fact that Bruce lives downstairs would at least explain why those two men shaking hands were so blasé when he walked in.
Except even that doesn’t make sense. If he’s always wandering in, then why is the ginger haired woman so clearly starstruck as he walks by:
She’d be used to it if he lived downstairs and was always doing this.
As would the dark-haired woman sitting near the manager:
It’s obvious from the way she looks at him and mouths the words “Bruce Willis” that she fancies Bruce Willis. But note how she only mouths the words “Bruce Willis”, not “Bruce Willis – why is he in his pyjamas?”
Willis explains what he expects from a broadband supplier:
I don’t want smaller, I want bigger. I want helicopters shot down by police cars. I want people on the verge of mass destruction. Saving people’s lives on a daily basis. Does that sound small to you?
Although actually, considering Willis’ most famous role as John McClane, it would be more accurate to say he saves people’s lives on little more than a near-annual basis.
Hearing this impassioned speech, the dark-haired woman bites her lip in a sexy way:
She then explains that actually, Sky’s broadband service is much better because it is “totally unlimited”, adding that she is also “totally unlimited”. I think that’s meant to be sexy in some way. Willis then winks at her and the two walk out together, presumably to fuck in the toilets.
I’m not sure what this advert is trying to say. I’ve watched it about fifty or sixty times now. I’m guessing Bruce Willis hasn’t had some sort of Charlie Sheen-style breakdown, but it’s difficult to interpret it in any other way. Either he’s wandering the streets in his dressing gown, or he’s picking up girls who work in the office upstairs. Something has gone wrong in his life.
I don’t plan to change my broadband supplier as a result of this advert.
HOLIDAY
I went on holiday:
UP
Last night, I took a walk through the park on the way home. It was a nice evening, and as I wandered through the grass and trees, I took a few photos along the way.
One of the photos was of the sky. I looked up and took a photo of the sky. I posted it on Twitter and just labelled it “Up”. A couple of minutes later, someone sent me a picture of what they could see when they looked up. Then a couple more did. Then a few more.
This is what Twitter sees when it looks up:
(Click each image to enlarge)
FESTIVAL
I’ve just got back from three days at the Secret Garden Party festival.
It was my first time camping at a festival. The festival experience was one which I had always suspected wouldn’t really suit me and so I never embraced it as a teenager. However, a couple of months ago, Julian from The Lost Lectures asked if I wanted to do my talk on why I like boring things, and I thought that maybe it would be a fun adventure, and so I said yes.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Secret Garden Party, but suspected it might be a bit like this:
As I sat on the train from King’s Cross, the two girls opposite me seemed to reinforce this idea. “Shall I text Jemima and ask if she’s packed an iPhone charger?” one of them asked. Later on, Jemima texted back. It turned out that although Jemima didn’t have her iPhone charger, fortunately Julia had packed hers. To make things worse, as we got off the train at Huntingdon, I saw that the girl who had asked about Jemima’s iPhone charger had a hula-hoop with her. These are not my people I realised.
Just as I was beginning to regret ever agreeing to all this, a group of three people in front of me asked if I wanted to share a cab with them. That was nice of them, I thought. We chatted during the short cab ride. One of them even offered me a Maynards Wine Gum, although she had opened the packet the wrong way up and that always bothers me so I declined (I didn’t tell her that was the reason). We arrived on site, and they went off to meet their friends or maybe just talk to someone who wasn’t me and so I went and queued for my wristband. The queue was slow-moving, but jolly, and the rain didn’t seem to put people off. It started to get a bit muddy though, so I changed my shoes:
It carried on raining as I got to the campsite. It rained as I put up my tent. It rained as I went to get some food. It rained as I watched Literary Death Match. It rained as I watched Robin Ince. It rained as I watched David O’Doherty. It carried on raining throughout the night. “Never mind, this is a fun adventure!” I kept telling myself.
I think it was around half past five the next morning – as I lay in my tent; unable to sleep because of the sound of music, the sound of people and the sound of the rain – that it stopped being a “fun adventure” and instead became one of the most miserable experiences of my life.
Here is that moment captured on film:
By the morning, everything was covered in mud:
If ever there were an environment seemingly designed to break me as a person, this was it. I’d been there less than twenty-four hours and I was desperate to leave. In my notebook, I started a tally chart; marking off each hour as it passed until eventually I could return to the civilised world.
Why had I done this to myself, I wondered? My talk wasn’t until Saturday evening. I could have got the train early on Saturday afternoon, stayed for a few hours and come home the same evening. But no, here I was. Stuck in a fucking swamp for another two days. I began to hate myself. I trudged around, trying to find somewhere warm and dry to sit. At one point, I even sat and watched a performance poet do a piece about Hugh Grant giving evidence at the Leveson inquiry, because the only other option was to get up and go somewhere else.
I went to the “Revolution Bunker”. Here you could see how hippyish notions of personal liberation and meditation slide so easily into conspiracism:
By Saturday, the rain had stopped and now the mud began to thicken. Each step became a challenge, the viscous mud weighing down each foot. But as the sun started to shine, you got the feeling that if weren’t for the mud, the place must look like a beautiful ramshackle village – all fairtrade coffee and vegan food stalls. But, watching people stagger around in the thick mud, the place seemed like some sort of post-apocalyptic disaster zone; a glimpse of what life would be like after a nuclear holocaust where only the middle-classes survived.
I know this all sounds incredibly ungrateful. Lots of people paid lots of money to go to Secret Garden Party and I get in for free and just complain about it. I’m sorry about that. It was really nice of Julian to invite me and there were moments I enjoyed and it was probably good for me as a person to have had this experience, even if just so that I know it’s something I don’t ever want to do again. And it’s always nice to see something really big get set on fire in the middle of a lake:
In fact, the Saturday and the Sunday were nice, and as I watched the enormous firework display at about one in the morning – surrounded by all sorts of people all sharing this moment, all sharing the same childlike grin which fireworks generate – I could absolutely understand why people come to festivals. But then I remember that moment at half past five on the Friday morning in the tent and how miserable I felt.
There’s a bit in the talk I did where I quote Georges Perec:
What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms.
To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.
At the very least, three nights in a tent has made me realise how much I appreciate bricks, concrete, glass and no no hair removal.
SITUATIONS VACANT
In a couple of weeks, the London 2012 Olympic Games will begin. I’m not particularly looking forward to the Olympics and am not a huge fan of the cynical marketing which has surrounded the Games and the Jubilee this year.
A couple of months ago, my friend Biltawulf was wasting his life by looking at rubbish on the internet, when he discovered a special package deal on the Thomas Cook website; two tickets for the Olympic opening ceremony and a two night stay at the Athenaeum Hotel website for the bargain price of only £12,998. A normal two night stay at the same hotel, not including Olympic opening ceremony tickets, would be £737.
The itinerary for the trip is as follows:
26 July
- Check in to your hotel. Please note you must arrive at your hotel by 18:00 on the 26th July for your accredited coach transfer to your evening meal
- Dinner at a local restaurant
27 July
- Breakfast at your hotel
- Pre Ceremony Meal
- Transfer to Olympic Park
- 19.30 – 23.30 – Ceremony – Opening Ceremony
28 July
- Breakfast at your hotel
- Check out of your hotel
The Athenaeum Hotel has its own restaurant and yet the itinerary mentions a coach transfer to a “local hotel”. How “local” is this other mystery restaurant if you have to travel there by coach? And why don’t they just give you a meal in the hotel’s restaurant? It’s only downstairs. Perhaps the hotel’s restaurant was already fully booked, or it might even be closed that evening. Biltawulf decided to check to see if the restaurant was open. A few minutes later, I received the following email:
Rather than simply checking to see if there were tables available at the restaurant that evening, Bilta decided to book a table for four.
I assume he booked a table for four, because although Bilta and I are friends, we’re not really the sort of friends who would go to a fairly smart restaurant for dinner together. By booking a table for four, Bilta carefully avoided putting undue pressure on our friendship. But whilst he solved that problem, another problem presents itself; there are now two empty seats at our table.
We need to fill those seats, and that is where YOU come in.
YOU can apply to have dinner with Biltawulf and me. Please bear in mind that we are not offering to pay for you to have dinner with us, you will have to pay for yourself. We are also not offering to pay for your travel or any other costs you may incur. We are not offering you anything whatsoever. We just need to fill the two empty seats at our table so it looks like we have friends.
If that sounds like something you are interested in, go HERE for more information and to apply online (deadline is 12noon on 21st July 2012).
Good luck!
